Cancer Center Membership

Research Summary

My research concerns access, delivery, and organization of substance abuse treatment services. My experience in this area includes studies evaluating efforts to improve access to publicly funded drug abuse treatment, assessing federal policy to end addiction as an SSI disability category, evaluating needle exchange as an HIV prevention strategy, and investigating interventions for drug-involved offenders. In recent years, my work has focused on tobacco dependence in addictions treatment, because of the high rate of smoking in this population, because of the known health consequences, and because of the increasing evidence that quitting smoking in addictions treatment also improves drug abuse outcomes.

I recently accepted leadership of the Tobacco Control Program of the UCSF NCI-funded HDFCCC, and I program the Cancer Center’s tobacco control seminar that postdoctoral fellows attend as part of their broader training. In the past 5 years, I have led the NIDA-funded P50 Center of Excellence, in the Department of Psychiatry, dedicated to continuing and extended care models of addiction treatment. At the national level, I chair the NIH Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (DIRH) review committee. I have a longstanding value on training the next generation of researchers. This is most apparent in our NIDA T32 postdoctoral fellowship training program in drug abuse treatment and services research, and in our more recent R25 designed to train underrepresented minority scientists in addiction treatment. In my career, I have had primary mentoring responsibilities for 16 pre and postdoctoral scholars, and for both clinical and research training.